This blog provides short, easy-to-digest summaries of recently published research relating to bullying, peer-aggression and peer-victimization. It is maintained by staff and students from the School of Psychological Sciences and Health at the University of Strathclyde.

There was an error in this gadget

August 16, 2012

Quality, not just presence, of friendships important for reducing bullying and peer-victimization

This
study aimed to build on a literature which examines the “Friendship protection
hypothesis.” This is the theory that having friends can prevent negative experiences
and therefore also prevent the negative outcomes associated with those
experiences. They note that both quality of friendships and quantity of
friendships may be important regarding whether or not young people experience
peer-victimization.

The
primary aim, as stated by the authors, was to address an issue which has
received little prior attention, namely the short-term (across one-year)
relationships between perceived support from friends and links to both bullying
and victimization. These authors also looked at whether depression and engaging
in property crimes were also related to bullying and victimization. They looked
at these issues because they have both been associated with bullying and
victimization in previous research.

The
authors recruited 980 (435 boys) young people aged between 12 and 16 years old
in Sweden. All young people completed self-report measures of bullying,
victimization, friendship quality, depression, and involvement in property
crime. These measures were all completed at two different points in time, and
the time points were one year apart. This is called a cross-lagged research
design and allows the researchers to unpick which of these issues leads to the
other(s).

Using
a statistical technique called structural equation modelling, Kendrick and her
colleagues found that:

Young
people who felt that they had a supportive friendship friend support at Time 1 reported
lower levels of victimization at Time 2; for boys, supportive friendships also
led to lower levels of bullying of others.

Bullying
of others at Time 1 predicted property crime at Time 2, but this was true only for
girls. Being involved with bullying of other may therefore be indicative of a
more serious downward spiral in the behaviour of girls than for boys.

Victimization
at Time 1 predicted depression at Time 2. Depression at Time 1 predicted victimization
at Time 2 for boys only (perhaps less tolerated among boys and so they are
picked on?). This supports previous work that suggests there is a vicious
circle taking place here, that is to say, victimization leads to higher
symptoms of depression which in turn lead to higher levels of victimization and
so on.

Victimization
at Time 1 did not predict levels of friend
support or property crimes at Time 2.

Depression
at Time 1 does not predict bullying at Time 2.

The
authors conclude that friendship may protect adolescents from being victimized because
such friendships increasing their psychological wellbeing, and that this in
turn may reduce their vulnerability to aggression from peers. They also note
that supportive friends may actually act directly as defenders, and in this way
may provide practical help as well as emotional support.

It
is worth noting that most of the effect sizes throughout this paper were fairly
small. This means that the effects of, e.g. victimization upon depression
across the year of the study, were not large. While some previous studies have
reported larger effects, I would say that the cross-lagged design of this study
(which takes into account that fact that the best predictor of e.g. depression
at Time 2 is depression at Time 1) will provide more realistic estimates of
these effects that a simple cross-sectional design does.